Like this:

EA has no idea what to do with their intellectual properties. Electronic Arts purchased and subsequently decimated developer Origin Systems Inc, wasting the opportunities it had with all of the IP’s that Origin developed throughout the 80s and early 90s. Then in 2008, EA gives us the awful top-down, 2D space combat game that they slapped the words Wing Commander onto to try to lure old fans of the quality 3D Wing Commander series to purchase it. For shame!

I’ve been on the lookout for the Warcraft audiobooks from Tantor Media ever since I posted about them last November. I noticed that they had disappeared from Tantor Media’s website, and their release dates came and went without a word. By all accounts, they were recorded by Dick Hill already, so the delay is perplexing.

The World of Warcraft site WoWInsider.com is reporting that they heard from Tantor Media that the audiobooks have been postponed. No further news as to whether that means temporarily delayed or permanently cancelled. I’ll be keeping an eye out for further news.

Well, I’ve made several posts that have been semi-related to Tabula Rasa, the action-oriented space MMO. Now we hear this week that NCsoft is shutting it down in February 2009. WoW claims another victim?

I wanted to like Tabula Rasa. Probably something to do with Richard Garriott being involved. I was in the beta for Ultima Online and played it for years. I watched Ultima Worlds Online: Origin (a.k.a. Ultima Online 2) and Ultima X: Odyssey come and go. About a thrid of the developers that worked on UWO:O went to Destination Games to work on Tabula Rasa. So I watched it with great interest and signed up for the beta. And when I played the beta, I thought the game in general was rather boring. Apparently I was not alone.

Coincidence that Richard Garriott bailed on the MMO bearing his name just days before the announcement that it was going to be shut down? I think not.

I wrote a little while back that EA was releasing an update to UO called Kingdom Reborn, and I mused that I wished they’d offer a free trial return for former players. Well, now they have. Called Return to Britannia, you can.

Former players in good standing will be able to log in and play Ultima Online using their former account names and passwords. This “free period” will last from September 25, 2 a.m. PST to until October 9, 2 a.m. PST.

Like this:

MTV did a feature on Richard Garriott’s home in Austin, Britannia Manor. Check out the videos here.

I think if I die and get reincarnated, I’d want to come back as Richard Garriott. Not only did he make the greatest series of videogames ever (aka the Ultima series), he builds himself medieval houses with secret passages, dungeons and observatories in them, creates videogames, and owns companies that go down to the Titanic and up to the International Space Station, where he’s going in 2008.